Obama's Policies Are Gutting the Middle Class

It was more than a little disconcerting to watch President Barack Obama pretend to be a friend of the middle class in Kansas on December 6, and to watch the press lap it up as if it was the gospel truth. The record shows that Obama's and his party's policies, plans, and proposals have done more harm to the middle class than any administration in my lifetime.

One of Obama's core claims is that the policies of the past, coming from largely Republican administrations espousing and carrying out conservative ideas, are what brought the economy to the brink, and that those ideas and policies must never again be considered.

Setting aside for the moment the fact that those ideas and policies were often not conservative enough, Obama's historical revisionism is about as brazenly dishonest as it gets. After all:

I don't recall the Community Reinvestment Act, which over several decades morphed into a sledgehammer forcing banks to act against their own interests or face endless litigation at the hands of ACORN-like groups, being a Republican or conservative policy.

I don't recall current New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's determination to make mortgage financing available based on ethnicity instead of ability and willingness to pay when he ran the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton something that Republicans or conservatives cheered.

Finally, I don't recall the systematic undermining of the market for mortgage-backed securities undertaken by Democratic Party cronies who ran the frauds by design known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac having Republican or conservative approval. While it's true that Fan and Fred had some RINO defenders, none of them -- and for that matter almost no one else in the country besides Democratic insiders -- knew that for fifteen years, Fan and Fred "routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring," presenting them as being of higher quality than they really were. As a result, mortgage-backed securities holders unknowingly bought hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of junk.

The housing and mortgage lending messes, which were almost entirely the creation of Democratic Party policies and Democrat apparatchiks' backroom scheming, are what brought the economy down. It certainly wasn't the straw-man, "on your own" mindset Obama chose to demonize in his speech.

The principal economic policy features of the quarter-century stretch Obama wants to send down the memory hole were tax cuts (with booming tax receipts, which the smarties said would never happen) and at least some regulatory restraint (but really not enough). The president claimed that this set of policies "doesn’t work. It has never worked."

Horse manure. Until things came to a head in housing, as James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out on December 7:

The U.S. economy grew at an average pace of 3.3 percent from 1983-2007, inflation ... was slayed, and the stock market rose by 1,400 percent. Median middle-class incomes rose by roughly 50 percent. Reaganomics worked. But Obama acts as if that generation of steady growth ... never happened since it doesn’t fit into his disingenuous narrative.

Once we were in the mess, the policies the newly-elected Obama chose to get us out were the ones which so obviously failed to get us out of serious difficulty in the past -- which leaves Obama's seriousness about wanting to get us out open to question. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's statist "solutions" for the Depression never brought unemployment below 12% during the 1930s. Similarly, three years of round after round of Keynesian stimulus, Keynesian money-printing, and unprecedented Keynesian deficits, combined with previously unseen regulatory excesses, have left the private sector's output smaller than it was almost four years ago. We still have supposedly grown men and women on the left who continue to claim, during the worst recovery since World War II, that the best form of economic stimulus is continuing to give money to those who aren't working.